For me one of the highlights of the OIDFA congress was
the lace of the Jewish museum in Prague. We had a
lecture by Dana Veselska, who had been instrumental in
putting the exhibition together and producing the
superb catalogue, which gave some insight into how the
collection had arisen and the importance of the
textiles and laces. The actual museum had been
established in 1906, but the collections increased
with items from the synagogues and communities of,
broadly speaking, what used to be Czechoslovakia, when
the Nazis wanted to establish a memorial of what was
to be an extinct culture. Plan went wrong, of course,
but the items survived. Recent work on the textiles
culminated in an exhibition held last year, with
catalogue and CD, and then to mark the OIDFA congress,
a special exhibition of the lace was held.
The importance of the lace collection in addition to
the Jewish interest is that it contains a large
quantity of early metal lace, which does not tend to
survive as it can be recycled for the metal content,
and also, because the laces are on textiles donated
for public use, they can be firmly dated and
provenanced. There were pieces with very floral
designs, grounded with torchon ground worked without
pins, like some early Flemish linen laces. These were
worked in what was called "leonine" thread - named
after Leone in Spain. It looked to me like "Jap" -
metal foil wound on a silk core - but could have been
very fine wire. The gimps were very narrow plate.
Some pieces included leaves and tallies in the leonine
thread - not something I should like to try!
In general, the designs did not seem to have a
particularly Jewish content, though the use on
curtains and valances for the Ark (cupboard used to
store the scrolls of the Pentateuch, or first five
books of the Hebrew Bible - the Torah) followed a
standard pattern, and similarly its use on the covers
for the scrolls. It was also used for brides' veils
and the canopy under which the wedding ceremony
typically takes place. One exception to this was a
piece on a scroll cover, three repeats of a
reticella-type design - the sort of pointed edging
found on early seventeenth century cuffs and collars.
This was worked in metal bobbin lace, and designed to
look like a crown, representing the Crown of the
Torah.
The catalogue had some detail on a form of work
thought to be typically Jewish, devised in the
nineteenth century, Shpanier Arbet. This was worked
with metal plate and leonine thread, using bobbins on
a bolster pillow, so not unlike lace making, though
the intertwining was worked differently (not stitches
built up from cross and twist, but winding the plate
round leonine thread and securing it with silk thread
to create the shapes. The finished work was used,
among other things, for the decorative strip on a
man's prayer shawl. Far more splendid than mine,
which simply has a strip of damask with the words of
the prayer to be said on putting it on; not that
beautiful, and not useful, as like the recipe on the
pie plate, you can't read it when you need it.
The catalogue was an education in itself. In addition
to the pictures and information about the pieces, it
contained reconstructed patterns for some of them. A
great deal of important original work has clearly gone
into it, and it will give a great deal to anyone
interested in textile and lace history or techniques,
or Judaica.
A final point - Lena Dahren, who was on the free-hand
lace course with me and several other Arachnes,
including Tamara, got a copy of the flyer for the
exhibition, and copied, without a pricking, the piece
on the cover! her version looked closer to the
original than the reconstruction made for the
exhibition. That used a pricking, and had torchon
ground with holes in it, and every repeat the same
length. Lena's and the original did not...
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
-
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line:
unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
